Wednesday, June 25, 2014

S E Asia Travels 2014 continued

DAY 7

Tuesday 24th
June 2014.

It was an 'at home'
morning with my youngest granddaughter's school friend coming to play. She lives with
her parents in a village about an hour away in a rice growing rural
area. The two girls were both pretty excited to be together as it was the
first time that they had been able to get together like this. When
her mother came to collect her I had a chance to chat to her about
the work she is involved in. She is part of an organization which
focuses on bringing safe water systems to the rural villages. This
includes rain water collection and filtering. They also have a
concrete toilet unit with septic tank. All of this is tied in with
hygiene education. It all sounded very worthwhile.

During the afternoon
my daughter her daughters, Pippa and I drove to the Hope International Christian
School, to choose some books from the Primary school library. I was
interested to see how much the junior school has expanded since I was
last here two years ago.

We then drove a
kilomtre of two to the Savvana Shopping Centre. First was to recharge
the data part of my SMART sim card. They have a scheme that you
purchase a pre-pay $2 top up and then phone in to SMART Exchange to
convert it into $30 data credit. An amazing idea which Becky and Phil
use all the time – and why not. Unfortunately, after the assistants
had tried all sorts of ways to get my phone done like this, they
realised that I had a traveller's promotion SIM and SMART Exchange
would not work. So I paid and extra $1 and got a traveller's 1GB of
data. I do not plan to upload any other videos to You Tube before we
head off to Vietnam on Sunday. So 1 GB should be enough. I am using
my phone as a wifi hot spot to link my laptop into.

Meanwhile, my daughter and
the girls headed up to the third floor to the ceramic painting
centre. The girls each bought a shape which they then painted at the
work benches. They certainly enjoyed the activity and ended up with a
couple of results they were especially proud of.

Then it was off to the
Apple service centre to see if they could replace the shattered
screen of a iPad. Seems the answer is no, but they can sell a
replacement at a reduced price. We just need to work out how to back
up the files to somewhere safe, when your Apple cloud storage is
full. Now that's going to occupy us for a few hours tonight.

At Savanna, I checked
out the DVD store but it was so congested that I decided not to
bother hunting anything out. I have bought quite a number of disks
here on previous visits. After visiting the new Aeon Mall on
Saturday, this older shopping centre certainly looked a little tired.
We did drop into the Lucky Supermarket on the ground floor where I
discovered a bottle of French red wine labled Cuvee Laurence.
Of course I just had to buy this to try out during the week.

There was the usual
mid to late afternoon rainfall with some wind. Temperatures seem to
be a little lower today and conditions are much more bearable.

Finally spotted one of
the ghekos which live around the outside of the house. But this one
was in Toby's room and looked like it came through a small corner
gap. It was about 300 mm long and a pale pastle green. During the
night these creatures make loud calling noises. On my first night
here I thought that the sound must have been some weird clock chiming
the hours; until I tried to count the chimes and found more than 12
in a row. They are surprisingly loud for such a small creature.

Across the lane is the
home and workshop of an undertaker. This morning a tuk tuk arrived
with planking for coffins stacked up on it. The undertaker has a
funeral tuk tuk parked out front. It has a construction like an
enclosed garden shed built on it. Highly colourful with decorations
of a Buddhist style all around it.

Put a new video up on
You Tube. During the process my phone hotspot ran out of data credit
with only 86% of the up loading completed. A few hours later when I
returned with a recharged phone the up load continued without any
difficulties. Something new learned. This morning my You Tube views
total clocked in at 8,754.